Collective noun (idea)

Lists of collective nouns for groups of animals (AKA 'terms of venery') are very popular among wordnerds, and many thousands of webpages and books have published ever-expanding lists of poetic words for mundane animals. I find these somewhat annoying, as the sole criteria for a word appearing on these lists is "someone thought it sounded cool".

This is a fine old tradition, best known to us from Juliana Berners's 1486 publication The Boke of St. Albans, the definitive book on falconry, hunting, and heraldry. She included over a hundred interesting words for groups of animals: a pride of lions, an exaltation of larks, an unkindness of ravens (along with some less popular ones, such as a business of ferrets, a fall of woodcocks, and a shrewdness of apes). We have no idea where she got these, but there is a good probability that they were included because she thought that they were an amusing form of wordplay, not because they were in common usage. Many of them were very unlikely to be used in any practical sense, as the number of 15th century Englishmen stumbling across a 'pride' of lions was vanishingly small.